627handworks

I can’t believe I finished it already!   Yesterday I spent…. oh, I ‘d say about 6 hours finishing up the quilting and it took me about 4 hours to do the hand binding on the back.  I was *determined* to get it in the wash and sleep with it last night.  It was a pretty big job to tackle and finish up but I’m glad I did – I love this quilt.

I used the Whimsy by Fig Tree Quilts for Moda jelly roll and a lot of Kona cotton in white. Each block is roughly 10.5 and it turned out to be a rather large quilt.  It almost covers the entire top of our king size bed.  It’s bound in Whimsy’s Grass Clover Daisy which turned out pretty nice. I originally wanted one of the red fabrics but now I’m glad the fabric store didn’t have one available.

It’s a simple pattern, the blocks are just strips of white/color/white/color/white and turned every other one. I chose so much white because I didn’t want to use patterns butted up against each other.  It gets to be too busy looking for me. You can get almost 2 quilts out of a jelly roll using this method – I have just less than half of them left.  Each strip was cut into 4’s so I got the most mileage for the fabric.   The remaining fabric patterns are more kid friendly so I may make a stripey baby blanket with them.

This is my 3rd quilt and first big one – I think I’ll try to make them larger like this. It’s more work but so much better to wrap up with.

Here is it, my very first quilt!  Last night I finished sewing up the back of the binding…. by HAND.  Yeah, that took a little longer than anticipated but it turned out pretty good.  It’s been laundered on permanent press and dried on low. I was a little nervous it would fall apart but it’s fine and it’s starting to get that wrinkly quilt feel.

For this quilt I used Moda Makin’ New Friends charm pack sashed with 3.5″ of a gold fabric from my local fabric store, Harper’s.  Since it’s my first quilt and I wasn’t sure if I was going to try free motion quilting I just got my backing and border fabrics from Joann’s.   The backing is a cute little red gingerbread man print.  Thought of doing flannel but wasn’t sure of trying that yet – I’m not so afraid now.

I ended up quilting it the ‘stitch in the ditch’ method because I want to practice the free motion on some scraps first. The measurement’s are 47″ x 55″ so roughly 4′ x 4.5′ which is a pretty good size for a throw blanket.  Overall I’m pretty happy with it!